Keynote
Richard Campbell’s talk was So What About Tablets?. In 90 minutes he took us through the history of the PC and left us with a startling revelation: the days of the computer that you sit at is numbered. All those things that we know about computers, from the mouse to the current state of the GUI is very transitional. I’ll try to find a link to his talk on the internet, but in the meantime, just listen to .NET Rocks!, his podcast.
Morning Session
After more delicious potatoes wrapped with bacon, I went to hear Jimmy Bogard talk about functional testing in ASP.NET MVC. At the Motley Fool, we use our tests written in Gherkin to do functional testing, but we also have to create the syntax for our DSL, a weighty process. Hearing him speak on the powers of WatiN and selenium (we use WebDriver for our automation) was pretty neat, and I picked up that if we weren’t invested in Gherkin and Sherpa (our test runner), then there are viable alternatives, though no silver bullets.
Afternoon Session I
Matt Milner talked about ASP.NET HTTP Web API. How glorious a thing. It essentially does the same things that you can do in MVC when creating a web API (BTDT), but it does them better. It’s like BASF for your web APIs. And even better than WCF, it talks barebones HTTP and is easy to configure. I’m definitely going to spend some time porting some of our internal APIs to it to give it a look see.
Afternoon Session II
Keith Dalby finished out the afternoon sessions on his talk Git More Done. Don’t know Keith Dalby? He’s the guy behind PoshGit, a Powershell Git client. As someone who uses just the essentials of Git, I’m impressed with how much there is underneath the surface. Were it not for the fact that Kiln started out with Mercurial, I probably would have started with Git.
Closing Time
Heading out from That Conference, we decided for one final hurrah and went for dinner at the Ishnala Supper club. It sits overhanging Mirror Lake, and has some of the best views of the lake at Sunset.
They also make a mighty fine Wisconsin Old Fashioned.
That’s to say nothing of their delicious prime rib.
All in all, it was a great conference, and I’ll definitely attend again.